Green, James Frederick; (2024) Labour Control in the Service Sector: A Hybrid Ethnographic Investigation into the Social Actors of a Public House in London. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The research conducted for this thesis is an investigative study into onsite, front of house, corporate public house workers experiences of control. The data gathered involved conducting a hybrid ethnography in a pub based in central London. The main contributions of this thesis are condensed under four interlinked themes which extend, and critique, current knowledge of key debates within the Sociology of Work. This includes emotional labour, labour control, labour exploitation and precarity: (i) complicating the theory of emotional labour (ii) (ongoing) learning to perform emotional labour, (iii) destabilised and disconnected labour control, (iiii) and the emotional precariat. In short, I argue that control in venues governed by corporations is destabilised by workers who rework and resist various job role requirements and managerial demands. That there is a disconnect between head office recommendations of doing the job and the reality of activity experienced on the pub floor which, ultimately, undermines corporate influence in this sector. I also show that learning to emotional labour does not simply halt post-introductory phases, as it is an ongoing emotional and physical process that is tested and (re)moulded over time. I further contribute to the theory of emotional labour by incorporating the aspects of space, (deviant) augmentation, collegial and managerial performances, for example, to show how these workers do emotional labour in contemporary pub work. Additionally, the experiences of collective (e.g., contract) and subjective (e.g., maintaining display) workplace conditions contribute to a fuelling of the precarization of emotion and display which associates these workers to, what I term, the emotional precariat. To conclude, I call for further research to establish the failure of trade unions’ integration into the industry, question whether place, space and occupation matters in doing emotional labour, and argue that the concepts introduced in this thesis can advance insight into other occupations.

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